Three Cheers for Podio
February 11, 2014

Three Cheers for Podio

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction

We used Podio at my last employer, 3 Birds Marketing. 3 Birds is a marketing company that caters to automotive dealerships. There are multiple departments at 3 Birds and several were in need of having a good, solid project management tool to juggle multiple daily tasks. Two other colleagues and me chose Podio because of it's cost-efficiency and it's flexibility. We spent two and-a-half months building the tool to serve as a single source for internal company announcements, for projects that needed to be handed off from one department to another, and as a storage space for images and other, internally-important projects. As far as I know, the entire company is still using Podio, even after I left the company for another opportunity in August, 2013.

At 3 Birds, Podio primarily addressed two business problems: one, the lack of organization for every project and two, the clarity to see "who is working on what" at any given point in time. Prior to implementing Podio at 3 Birds, dozens of projects were sold by the sales team to the client base without checking in with the production / feasibility of the deliverables. Clients' expectations were bloating out of control and the production team(s) - namely, the writers and graphic designers - scrambled to gather details to start and deliver projects, often on the same day. The stress level was unnecessarily high. Podio addressed this - and the other challenge - who is working on what - by giving all affected teams a clear, bird's eye view of all of the projects lined-up and who they were assigned to. We built apps that represented each type of project and made many fields required in those apps. All of those apps were linked to one app, called "projects quick view" that required an assignee and a due date. The manager could then add someone to the project in projects quick view and all details had already been entered in respective apps.
  • Flexibility of apps
  • Required fields of apps
  • Linkability of apps to each other and between worskpaces
  • Not sure if this has been implemented but having drop-down menus that change depending on your previous selection - AND/OR functionality would be great.
  • Some ability to reskin Podio.
  • Archiving of old projects / content of apps without manually moving contents.
  • Increased employee efficiency
  • Less mistakes
  • Better time management
  • Client expectations better set and met
  • Salesforce.com,Basecamp,Zoho Projects
Compared to Salesforce: Podio is not as robust as a tool for CRM tracking. It also doesn't have the in-email capabilities that SF offers.
Compared to Basecamp: Podio is somewhat similar to Basecamp but doesn't offer the same functionality with checking items off and archiving projects.
Compared to Zoho Projects: Podio is vastly superior to Zoho Project's lack of flexibility (requiring a development team to build) and accessibility by all members (Zoho Projects requires a very limited number of "owners" of projects which makes it difficult if multiple owners need to assign one or more people to a project).
I am no longer at my former employer where we implemented and used Podio. At my new employer, I have pitched the idea of using Podio to the CEO but I am not sure that it could act as an replacement for Salesforce. We aren't to the point of needing a robust project management tool, yet, but if that day comes, I'll be sure to see if there is renewed interest in Podio here.
Well-suited scenarios:
- Short-term projects: We used the apps to build project briefs because our projects were not very complex and had a tight turnaround. I'm not sure how well they would work for longer-term projects.
- Sales team/Account Management team to Creative team / production team hand-off
- Uploading content to one source
- Internal source of information for a company

Less appropriate:
- Scrum development - Podio was pitched to the development team but, at the time, it was not suitable enough to address their very complex needs.
- Salesforce / similar equivalent - Podio is great but it's just not an equivalent tool to what Salesforce can do (or at least it wasn't when I used it six months ago).
- Gantt charts - the last time I used Podio, the available apps in the marketplace were not robust enough to craft easily-editable Gantt charts.
- Replacement for Excel. The last time I used Podio, the spreadsheet implementation and exportation were both clunky - the process rendered questionable results. It'd be nice to see Podio's spreadsheet view behave like a Google spreadsheet, complete with formulas and the ability to make charts.